The 10 Best Family Movies in Film History, Ranked

Published Nov 7, 2026, 8:15 AM EST

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A good family movie isn’t the same as a kids’ movie. The ones on this list work for a seven-year-old and for the parent sitting next to them, and sometimes the parent ends up crying more. They manage that by being funny, scary, and sad in the right amounts without talking down to anybody.

I tried to mix things up, so you’ll find a talking pig, a flying nanny, an alien, a forest spirit, and a very polite bear. Some are almost a hundred years old and others are only a few years old but all of them carry the sweet sense of nostalgia. Here they are, ranked from great to the one I’d show a family first.

10 ‘Babe’ (1995)

Image via Universal Pictures

Babe is a little pig who gets won at a county fair by Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) and learns he’d rather herd sheep than end up on a dinner table. Christine Cavanaugh voices him, and Rex, the grumpy sheepdog who isn’t sure about the new arrival, is voiced by Hugo Weaving. Babe was produced and co-written by George Miller, the man behind Mad Max, and the animals on screen are a mix of real ones and animatronics. About 48 piglets were used to play Babe, since they grew too quickly to stay the same size.

The film earned seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and won for visual effects. Cromwell, who got a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, reportedly became a vegan after making it. Hoggett barely talks for most of the film, but his quiet pride in Babe at the sheepdog trials, ending with the phrase “that’ll do, pig,” is one of the most touching moments in any family movie. It’s gentle, odd, and oddly moving.

9 ‘Mary Poppins’ (1964)

Image via Walt Disney Productions

A magical nanny, Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews), floats down on her umbrella to look after two kids, Jane and Michael Banks, whose father, Mr. Banks (David Tomlinson), is too busy with his bank job to notice them. Bert (Dick Van Dyke), a chimney sweep and one-man band, leads them through painted sidewalk drawings and rooftop dances. Mary Poppins took Walt Disney about twenty years to make, because P.L. Travers, who wrote the books, kept refusing to sell him the rights.

Andrews was making her film debut, and she won the Oscar for Best Actress after losing the part of Eliza in My Fair Lady to Audrey Hepburn. The Sherman Brothers wrote the songs, and “Chim Chim Cher-ee” won the Oscar for Best Original Song. The film got 13 nominations in all and won five. Van Dyke’s Cockney accent has been teased for decades, and he’s laughed about it himself, but his energy is a big part of what makes the movie so warm.

Image via Universal Pictures

Elliott (Henry Thomas), a lonely ten-year-old in California, finds a small alien stranded on Earth and hides him in his closet. His brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and little sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) join the secret, while the government closes in. Steven Spielberg directed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and he shot it in order, so the kids’ tears at the end were real. Melissa Mathison wrote the script, and the camera stays low, at a child’s eye level, for most of the movie.

Thomas got the part after an audition where he improvised a scene about the government taking E.T., crying so convincingly that Spielberg told him he had the job. Mars turned down the use of M&Ms in the film, so Reese’s Pieces got the spot and sales soared. Carlo Rambaldi built E.T., and the creature’s face reportedly blends features from Einstein, Hemingway, and Carl Sandburg.

7 ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965)

Image via 20th Century Studios

Maria (Julie Andrews), a young nun who can’t quite follow the rules, is sent to look after seven children of a stern naval captain, Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer). She teaches them to sing, wins over their father, and then the Nazis arrive in Austria. Robert Wise directed The Sound of Music, and he shot it on location in Salzburg. The film won five Oscars, including Best Picture, and became the highest-grossing film of its time.

The famous opening shot of Andrews spinning on a mountaintop took many tries, since the helicopter’s downdraft kept knocking her over. Plummer has joked that he hated the movie so much he called it “The Sound of Mucus,” though he later softened. The real von Trapps didn’t hike over the mountains to escape, they took a train to Italy. Even so, “Do-Re-Mi” and “Edelweiss” have outlasted almost every other movie song.

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Movies/Academy Awards/Best Picture

Collider · Best Picture Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie? Five winners · ten questions · one envelope

Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be and what it can do to you. One of them is the film made for the way your mind works, and ten questions will work out which. The nominees

2020Parasite

2023Everything Everywhere All at Once

2024Oppenheimer

2015Birdman

2008No Country for Old Men

Open the envelope

Reel01 / 10

Question 01 of 10TONE

01 What kind of film experience are you really after? The best movies do not just entertain. They leave something behind.

ASomething that pulls the rug out, that makes me think I am watching one kind of film and then reveals I am watching another entirely. BSomething overwhelming: funny, sad, absurd and genuinely moving, all at once. CSomething grand and weighty, a film that makes me feel the full scale of what I am watching. DSomething formally daring, a film that pushes what cinema can even do. ESomething lean and relentless, pure tension with no wasted frame.

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Reel02 / 10

Question 02 of 10THEME

02 Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What is yours?

AClass, inequality, and what people are willing to do when desperation meets opportunity. BIdentity, family, and the chaos of holding your life together while everything falls apart. CGenius, moral responsibility, and the catastrophic weight of a decision you can never take back. DEgo, legacy, and the terror of becoming irrelevant while you are still alive to watch it happen. EEvil, chance, and whether moral order exists at all or we just tell ourselves it does.

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Reel03 / 10

Question 03 of 10STRUCTURE

03 How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.

AGenre-twisting. I want it to start in one lane and migrate into something completely different. BMaximalist and genre-blending: comedy, action, drama and sci-fi in one ride. CEpic and non-linear, cutting between timelines to build a mosaic of cause and consequence. DA single unbroken flow. I want to feel like I am living it in real time with no cuts to safety. ESpare and precise, every scene doing exactly what it needs to do and nothing more.

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Reel04 / 10

Question 04 of 10VILLAIN

04 What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?

AA system: invisible, structural, and almost impossible to fight because it has no single face. BThe self, and the ways we sabotage, abandon and fail the people we love most. CHistory, and the unstoppable momentum of events no single person can stop or redirect. DThe industry, the machinery of culture that chews up talent and spits out irrelevance. EPure, implacable evil, a force so certain of itself it becomes almost philosophical.

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Reel05 / 10

Question 05 of 10ENDING

05 What do you want from a film's ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?

AShock and inevitability, a conclusion that recontextualizes everything before it. BEarned emotion. I want to cry, laugh and feel hopeful, even if the world is a mess. CDevastation and grandeur, an ending that leaves me sitting in silence for a few minutes. DAmbiguity, something open enough that I am still turning it over days later. EBleakness, an honest refusal to pretend the world is tidier than it is.

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Reel06 / 10

Question 06 of 10WORLD

06 Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything: mood, stakes, what is even possible.

AA gleaming modern city with a hidden underside, beauty masking rot and wealth masking desperation. BA collapsing suburban life that opens onto something infinite, the multiverse inside one ordinary person. CThe corridors of power and science at a world-historical turning point, where decisions echo for decades. DThe grimy, alive chaos of New York and Hollywood, fame as both destination and trap. EVast, indifferent landscape, desert and highway where violence arrives without warning or reason.

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Reel07 / 10

Question 07 of 10CRAFT

07 What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature, the element that makes it unmistakable.

AProduction design and mise-en-scène, every frame composed to carry meaning beneath the surface. BEditing and tonal control, the ability to move between registers without losing the audience. CScore and sound design, music that becomes inseparable from the dread and awe of what you see. DCinematography as performance, the camera not recording events but taking part in them. ESilence and restraint, what is left unsaid doing more work than any dialogue could.

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Reel08 / 10

Question 08 of 10PROTAGONIST

08 What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you follow says something about you.

ASomeone smart and resourceful who makes increasingly dangerous decisions under pressure. BSomeone overwhelmed and ordinary who turns out to be capable of something extraordinary. CA brilliant, tortured figure whose gifts and flaws cannot be separated from each other. DA self-destructive artist whose ego is both their superpower and their undoing. EA quiet, principled person trying to make sense of a world that has stopped making sense.

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Reel09 / 10

Question 09 of 10PACE

09 How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint. Others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.

AI love a slow build when the payoff is going to be seismic. Patience for a devastating reveal. BGive me relentless momentum. I want to feel breathless and emotionally spent by the end. CEpic runtime does not scare me. If the material demands three hours, give me three hours. DI want it propulsive even when nothing is technically happening, restless energy throughout. EDeliberate and unhurried. I want dread to accumulate in the spaces between the action.

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Reel10 / 10

Question 10 of 10AFTERMATH

10 What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?

AUnsettled, like I have just seen something I cannot fully explain and cannot stop thinking about. BMoved and energized, like the film reminded me what matters and gave me something to hold onto. CHumbled, like I have been in the presence of something important and overwhelming. DExhilarated, like I have just watched cinema do something it has never quite done before. EHaunted, like a cold, quiet dread that stays with me for days.

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The envelope, pleaseAnd the Oscar goes to

★ Best Picture, 2020 Parasite Bong Joon-ho, 2019 A film that hides its true intentions until the moment it is ready to reveal them.

You are drawn to films that operate on several levels at once, that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image. From the Collider file

• The first film not in the English language to win Best Picture, in the Academy's 92-year history to that point.
• It took four Oscars in one night: Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature.
• It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2019 by a unanimous jury vote, the first Korean film to do so.
• The Park family's modernist house was not a location. It was built from scratch on an outdoor lot.

Reads between the lines Loves a reveal Attention to detail

★ Best Picture, 2023 Everything Everywhere All at Once Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022 A film that refuses to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful.

You want it all, and this one gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is among the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse science fiction, family drama, existential crisis, and an emotional core that sneaks up on you in the middle of the chaos. You respond to ambition. Being overwhelmed is the design, not the side effect, because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what the film is about. From the Collider file

• Seven Oscars, including three acting wins for Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis.
• Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress.
• The visual effects were handled by a team of fewer than ten people, most of them self-taught.
• Ke Huy Quan had all but left acting for two decades before this role brought him back.

Wants everything Big swings Soft center

★ Best Picture, 2024 Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan, 2023 A film about the gap between what we can do and what we should do.

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale, films that treat history not as a backdrop but as a force, then place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer sits inside one of the most consequential moments in human history and refuses to look away from it. You want your films to feel important without being self-important, earning their ambition through craft and the gravity of the subject. This one is enormous, complicated, and offers no easy comfort. From the Collider file

• Seven Oscars, including Nolan's first wins for directing and for Best Picture.
• Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. both took their first Academy Awards for it.
• Kodak engineered a black-and-white 65mm stock that did not previously exist so Nolan could shoot those sequences on IMAX.
• A three-hour, R-rated drama about theoretical physics that passed 950 million dollars worldwide.

Thinks in decades Scale and weight No easy comfort

★ Best Picture, 2015 Birdman Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014 A film doing something that probably should not be possible.

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction, where the how of the filmmaking becomes part of the what it is about. Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman, stitched to appear as one continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego. You respond to formal daring. Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera make something unlike anything else: a film about creativity, relevance, self-destruction and never quite knowing whether your work means anything at all. From the Collider file

• Four Oscars, among them Best Picture and Best Director for Iñárritu.
• Emmanuel Lubezki's win here was the middle of three consecutive cinematography Oscars, after Gravity and before The Revenant.
• Antonio Sánchez's improvised drum score was ruled ineligible for the score category, which caused a minor uproar.
• The long-take illusion was built from a handful of extended shots joined by hidden cuts.

Formally daring Camera as character Ego and art

★ Best Picture, 2008 No Country for Old Men Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007 A film that treats dread as a form of meaning.

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, refuses to explain itself, and lets unease do the talking. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is about the arrival of a new kind of evil: implacable, arbitrary, and indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of things. It is one of the most tightly controlled films ever made, and that control is the source of the terror. You want your films to haunt you rather than comfort you, and you have no interest in a resolution that would be a lie. From the Collider file

• Four Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.
• Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, with much of his dialogue carried over intact.
• Carter Burwell's score runs about sixteen minutes and is nearly inaudible by design.
• Roger Deakins was nominated twice that year, for this and The Assassination of Jesse James, and won for neither.

Trusts silence Dread over answers No tidy endings

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6 ‘Toy Story’ (1995)

Image via Pixar Animation Studios

Woody (Tom Hanks), a cowboy doll, is the favorite toy of a boy named Andy until Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), a shiny new space ranger who thinks he’s real, takes his place. The two end up lost in a gas station and a neighbor’s backyard, and have to work together to get home. Toy Story was the first fully computer-animated feature film, directed by John Lasseter at Pixar, and it took about four years to make. The film was built from roughly 114,000 individual frames.

Woody was originally written as a much meaner character, and early Disney screenings were so negative that the whole story was reworked. Randy Newman wrote “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” and Don Rickles voices Mr. Potato Head. Lasseter received a special Oscar for the film. Pixar was nearly broke when it started, and the success of this movie changed animation forever.

5 ‘Finding Nemo’ (2003)

Image via Pixar

Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks), a nervous clownfish, loses his only son, Nemo (Alexander Gould), when a scuba diver catches him and carries him off to a dentist’s fish tank in Sydney. Marlin sets off across the ocean with Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a blue tang with terrible short-term memory. Andrew Stanton directed Finding Nemo, and the idea came from his own fear of being an overprotective dad, along with childhood memories of staring at a fish tank in a dentist’s office.

Dory’s part grew bigger once DeGeneres was cast, and Stanton noticed that her improvised, scattered way of speaking worked perfectly for the character. Pixar animators took scuba lessons to study how water and light behave underwater. Barry Humphries voices Bruce, a shark who’s trying to give up eating fish, and Willem Dafoe plays Gill. The movie won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

4 ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939)

Image via Warner Bros.

Dorothy (Judy Garland), a Kansas farm girl, gets swept up by a tornado into the land of Oz, and has to follow the Yellow Brick Road to find the Wizard, hoping he’ll send her home. Along the way she picks up a Scarecrow, a Tin Man, and a Cowardly Lion. The Wizard of Oz switches from sepia to full Technicolor the moment Dorothy steps out of her house, and the effect was stunning in 1939.

Buddy Ebsen was first cast as the Tin Man but fell ill from the aluminum makeup, and Jack Haley replaced him. Toto, played by a female terrier named Terry, was reportedly paid more per week than many of the Munchkin actors. The studio almost cut “Over the Rainbow” from the film for slowing the pace. It won Oscars for Best Original Song and Best Original Score, and still lost Best Picture to Gone with the Wind.

3 ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ (1988)

Image via Studio Ghibli

Two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, move to the countryside with their father so they can be closer to their mother, who is recovering in a hospital. In the nearby forest they meet Totoro, a huge, furry spirit who doesn’t talk much and rides a flying top. My Neighbor Totoro has no villain at all, which is rare for a children’s film, and the tension comes from the girls worrying about their mother. Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed it at Studio Ghibli.

Miyazaki’s own mother spent years in hospital with spinal tuberculosis, and that memory shaped the story. The film was released as a double feature with Grave of the Fireflies, and it didn’t do well at first. Then Totoro merchandise took off, and he became the Ghibli logo. The Catbus, a giant cat that doubles as a bus, is one of the most original creations in any animated movie.

2 ‘The Lion King’ (1994)

Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Simba, a young lion cub, is the heir to the throne until his evil uncle Scar (Jeremy Irons) tricks him into believing he killed his father, Mufasa (James Earl Jones), and he runs away to the jungle. There he meets Timon (Nathan Lane) and Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella), who teach him to stop worrying. The Lion King borrows from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Disney animators studied real lions brought to the studio to get their movements right.

Elton John and Tim Rice wrote the songs, and Hans Zimmer composed the score, with the opening “Circle of Life” setting the tone. The wildebeest stampede mixed hand-drawn animation with computer-generated herds. Elton John and Rice won the Oscar for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” and Zimmer won for the score. It became the highest-grossing hand-drawn animated film ever, and Mufasa’s death still gets to people decades later.

1 ‘Paddington 2’ (2017)

Image via StudioCanal

Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw), a polite bear from Peru, is living happily with the Brown family in London, until he’s framed for stealing a rare pop-up book he wanted to give his aunt for her birthday. He’s sent to prison, where he wins over the inmates, including a gruff cook, Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson).

Colin Firth was originally cast as Paddington’s voice but was replaced by Whishaw, who captures the bear’s kindness perfectly. Grant has said it’s among his favorite roles, and he’s hilarious in a series of disguises. The movie held a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes for a long time, and the scene in which Paddington turns the prison laundry pink is one of the funniest in recent memory. It’s a rare film that believes being polite and kind can change everyone around you, and it makes you believe it too.

Paddington 2